Five Ways to Ensure Your Organization is Getting the Cloud Partnership It Deserves

Everyone is in the cloud. Journeying to the cloud. Getting organized around the cloud. If you find yourself completely confused by the cloud partnerships you could be making to accelerate your business and its bottom line, you aren’t alone. The market is crowded and the options can be overwhelming. As an established technology organization, you want to be the trusted advisor to your customers who are looking to leverage the cloud.

Here is a personal checklist to help you determine the best cloud partner for you, your business – and your customers.

1 – Cloud is the organization’s core competency: Seek a partner who gets up every single day and thinks about one thing: the cloud. Their bread and butter is grounded in the ability to provide a best-in-class cloud experience for your customers. They have core competencies that surround cloud, enabling you to have the expertise available in your service offering without any requirement to build your overhead around that expertise.

2 – Offers a variety of cloud solutions for your customers: Cloud is not a one-trick pony, and customers want the choice and option to place some workloads in a private, secure domain – and others in a public cloud. A cloud provider that offers a full hybrid solution and focuses more on the right fit and combination for your customer is an appropriate partner for your organization.

3 – Has application integration expertise: A cloud organization is only as good as its ability to transition applications into its cloud. Compute, storage and bare metal are just that. The real value is in the expertise of a cloud organization’s team, whose focus is assisting your customer in transitioning their applications appropriately.

4 – Provides full transparency into the environment to you and your customers: Cloud providers should come to the table with the full capability for your customers to see their environments, request change orders, submit an incident or other service needs. This needs to be a streamlined, effective process for you and your customers.

5 – Strong onboarding and partner program: Those cloud providers that truly enable others are serious in their commitment to ensuring a seamless, efficient journey into the cloud business. They should also provide an ongoing program that offers values and benefits to assist in your own continued success.

The choices out there are significant, and the confusion growing. However, if you ground yourself in evaluating these five areas of a cloud provider’s business, you will be further down the path of selecting an appropriate cloud partner for your business.